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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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How in the hell is that efficient?
Yeah, the pedals have got to be solely due to regulations.
It’s definitely less efficient than a standard well-tuned bike. On the other hand, I’m guessing you can plug it in to charge the battery and so you the rider don’t need to supply all of the energy to drive the thing. Plus it’s going to be excellent for hills because you don’t need to supply all the climbing power. If this were a pure manual crank vehicle you would absolutely hate it on the first hill! Pedaling 1200lbs up a hill sounds like an absolute nightmare!
No doubt. But it's pretty unusual compared to pedal assist. With pedal assist, your leg work doesn't lose any power in the transfer to the wheels, and you still get all the benefits of this system.
Perhaps the reason they didn’t go with pedal assist is due to the sheer amount of torque needed to pull that much weight. I could see them not wanting to have a huge gear train to be able to get the pedal power into the correct part of the torque band to both accelerate and maintain pulling power.
The pedals are additionally used as a controller to engage the electric motor & make it move (because that is "the electric bike").
And one can still paddle without moving just by holding the brakes (to just fill the battery).
The pedals are still needed to generate power for the battery, regardless if the paddling motion also activates the electric motor (electric bike) or not (electric scooter).